Fresh Blog Archive

Posts for July, 2012

Local developer John Raettig and his firm Raettig Redevelopment wants to explore the possibility of developing the Sydney Hih complex, which is currently under a raze order, Urban Milwaukee is reporting tonight.

The Zoning, Neighborhoods & Development Committee voted 4-1 last week in favor of lifting an interim historic designation, paving the way for the demolition of the group of four buildings near the intersection of N. Old World 3rd St. and W. Juneau Ave. The Common Council will vote July 6 on the matter.

In the hours of testimony given at the ZND meeting, an enormous amount of evidence was given by city officials and local developers about the difficulty of developing the site and the state of disrepair of the buildings. Raettig was one of a the few voices to suggest the situation was not so hopeless.

"I think it is a mistake to think of them as an impediment to development," Raettig said of the buildings. He said that many of the developments he's been involved in, including the Johnson Bank building, the Cawker building and buildings on Milwaukee St., also seemed like beyond-redemption eyesores.

Not fearing the city's estimate for renovation, placed at $6.6 million, Raettig put together an initial design to save the complex, Urban Milwaukee reports. The designs indicate Raettig would like to propose a renovation of the individual properties.

Nestled into the gently sloping hills and sprawling stretches of grass, beneath trees both skyscraping and squat, are bits of modernism that sit in the landscape like punctuation marks.

Bring all of this into Peg’s former living room, sliced up, rearranged and concentrated, as artists Santiago Cucullu and Ester Partegas have recently done, and we get a sense of the epic showdown that exists in that seemingly pastoral setting.

Huge beams are crammed into the room, as if one of the outdoor works had been brought up to the house and wedged inside. What might look like Pick-Up Stix lightly dropped into place outdoors feels like architectural collapse here. It looks familiar, like the sculptures outside, until we move into the room and are left to duck and weave around these crisscrossing forms, to locate an escape route.

Then the eyes kick in again, and this is when the real contest begins.

In some ways, Cucullu and Partegas tamp down the potency of the lush outdoors. They flatten it and drain it of its color in the black-and-white wallpaper that covers the walls of the room, creating a backdrop of sorts, not unlike the one outside.

It’s as if they took photographs of trees and branches, photocopied them, cut them up, rearranged them to create Ab Ex-like patterns, photocopied them again and pasted them to the walls. There are some obvious echoes here of the ways the outdoors are often housetrained, through landscape paintings or faux forest wallpapers, for instance.

The Sydney Hih got another break on Friday – one that will likely stay its demolition for a few more weeks.

The Milwaukee Common Council voted 13-1 to accept a recommendation from its zoning committee to deny interim historic designation for the complex of buildings located in the Park East area.

But Ald. Bob Bauman, who favors preserving the buildings, then used a rarely used parliamentary tactic to delay the effect of that vote.

Bauman asked for a motion to “Reconsider and Enter on the Journal,” which required only three favorable votes. That motion passed, which means the council will again have to vote on the interim designation request at its next meeting, on July 24.

Earlier, Bauman has asked the council to approve a motion to hold the matter until the next meeting. That council voted 10-4 against it.

If you’ve sat in an airport or train station for more than 5 minutes, you know that our public furniture could use a little rethinking. Humans contort themselves into all kinds of unnatural and uncivilized positions to try to get comfortable.

Consider also the iconic image of Steve Jobs introducing the iPad, relaxed in a gorgeously designed Le Corbusier chair. Our technological tools have changed, and so has the way that we sit when engaged or working.

These are the things, along with additional cutting-edge research into ergonomics, that inspired the creation of a new prototype for a public bench, an undulating, sculptural form that invites almost infinite forms of repose.

The “Drift” bench, inspired by the Midwestern topography and the gently curving sand and snow drifts here, has just gone on exhibit at Discovery World. It was designed and created at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in a special studio designed to bring academics, architecture students, architects, urban planners, Midwestern manufacturing companies and civic leaders together for a project.

To create the bench, the KI Collaborative Studio at UWM, directed by architects Grace La and James Dallman, created a “human caliper,” a chair with instrumentation on it designed to study the ways various bodies sit correctly and incorrectly, how people get comfortable and uncomfortable.

Laurie Winters, the director of exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, has announced that she is leaving the museum at the end of the month.

Winters, who has been overseeing the conceptualization and implementation of the museum's exhibitions and related programming, will become president and executive director of a new organization, The Art Consortium, Inc., a non-profit organization designed to create innovative forms of collaborations among museums worldwide. This new organization will be based in Milwaukee (we will report additional details about it in the days to come).

"Laurie has been an extremely valuable contributor to the museum and I have no doubt she will apply the same passion and creativity to her work as she enters this next phase of her career," MAM's director Dan Keegan wrote in an email to staff last night.

Winters arrived at MAM in 1997 and has organized some of the museum's most important, critically well received and best-attended shows, including "Leonardo da Vinci and the Splendor of Poland" in 2002 (which earned Winters the Cavalier's Cross of the Order of Merit from the president of Poland), "Rembrandt and His Time" in 2005, and "Beidermeier: The Invention of Simplicity" in 2006. More recently, she spearheaded the "Summer of China," an ambitious cycle of exhibits in 2011 featuring the art of China across several centuries.

Winters has been the recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including at the Center for Curatorial Leadership and The Getty Leadership Institute.

Keegan wrote that the museum will begin a search for Winters' replacement immediately. MAM also recently announced that Lisa Hostetler, curator of photography, would be departing this summer to take a job at the Smithsonian. Before that, Mary Weaver Chapin, curator of prints and drawings, left for the Portland Art Museum.

It was the lightness of Milwaukee’s art scene that kept artist-filmmaker Mark Escribano ensconced here for years.

“You come to the darkness,” Escribano once said of his move from sunny Mexico City to Wisconsin and its winters, “and everyone wants lightness.”

Escribano, who was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in Florida, came here to help college chum Tate Bunker with a film project. He expected a short stay. But he quickly fell in with a clique of filmmakers, visual artists, musicians and writers, a smart group with an intentionally unserious ethic and an aesthetic he found delightfully unexpected.

He stuck around for about a decade, embracing the kind of conceptual bouyancy that pervaded the scene in those years. He became a central figure in the art community and was one of the early recipients of the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship, the area’s most prestigious award for individual artists.

The $5,000 cash prize that came with the fellowship helped him complete his first feature film, “The Super Noble Brothers,” a 2009 art film and documentary about a trio of brothers at the nexus of Milwaukee’s scene.

Escribano became part of the art collective the White Box Painters with artists Brent Budsberg, Shana McCaw and Harvey Opgenorth and has been involved in projects such as William Shatner’s “Gonzo Ballet,” local filmmaker Frankie Latina’s epic Super-8 feature “Modus Operandi” and the Emmy-nominated TV series “Wisconsin Foodie.”

It wasn’t exactly unbearable, but at some point Escribano desired a cultural scene with a different kind of weight. So he decamped, perhaps ironically depending on your point of view, to Los Angeles, three and a half years ago.

He was curious about what the shift in context would mean for his career as a photographer, filmmaker and artist. He’s not chasing mainstream moviemaking, but he is getting good work making music videos and doing some commercial jobs, too. Returning to warmer climes was inevitable as well, he says.

What he’s also found, though, is that carving out time for art is harder there, where he’s hustling to make a go of things. While his assimilation into Milwaukee’s art scene clocked in at less than a week, getting established in L.A., while possibly worth the wait, could take a decade, he estimates.

Recently, Escribano pulled a yellow suitcase out of a closet, an antiquated type with a hard case and no wheels. Inside are what he lovingly calls his “orphaned art films,” nine unfinished short films, many never before seen.

With a little bit of distance and remove from his Wisconsin days, he looks at these films, all but one made in Milwaukee and most featuring area artists, as the work that matters most to him.

They are abstract, experimental and at times esoteric to a fault, he says, itching to get back to work on them. Some of the artists featured in them include John Losciuto, Bunker and Budsberg, who is the primary figure in the most epic of the films, “Mime Sickle Moon.” For that film, shot over a period of nearly 6 years, Budsberg repeatedly shaved his head, painted his face and performed silently for the camera on location around Milwaukee.

As it turns out, the technology now exists for a high definition transfer of these 16 millimeter films to digital medium, which will make it easier for Escribano to finish them up.

Creating space in his life for this work is a little like finding a middle ground between Milwaukee and L.A., he says. Once complete, sometime in the coming months, he’ll screen them in both cities and release a compilation DVD.

“I really love these films and believe they represent the type of work I’m really most engaged by,” he says.

In the meantime, we caught up with Escribano and asked him a few questions for this edition of “Art City Asks.” He answered questions via email, which have been lightly edited for space.

Mary Louise Schumacher: What images keep you company in your work space?Mark Escribano: Right now, there is a large Italian version of the movie poster for Bob Rafelson's "King of Marvin Gardens" that has this gold, red and green palette going on and an image of Jack Nicholson with a gun to his throat. There’s a Jackson Pollock jigsaw puzzle encased in a glass frame that I found on the street and that is mysteriously, or comically, missing two pieces. There’s a small photo of me taken by filmmaker Frankie Latina… And, there’s a black-and-white photo of my mom smiling that I took when she was in her 40s.

MLS: Tell me about a failed piece you once made and what you learned from it.ME: This is difficult because it seems like failures, if they are to be judged by positive audience reaction or level of popularity, would be in the majority. I usually take the stance that if I find the courage to create something from an idea and am successful in taking a concept from a thought state to something concrete in a manner that is honest and inspired… then that's a successful piece. But to answer your question more directly, I try to learn from all of the parts of my work that fall short of inspiring the audience or that lack the technical or artistic quality intended.

MLS: What are you reading?ME: I've been reading and re-reading Andrei Tarkovksy's "Sculpting in Time" for a project I'm working on that will basically be a repackaging of the parts of the book that refer to his beliefs about what it means to be an artist. Other than that, I'm nearly finished with James Ellroy’s "LA Confidential", which is a telling and entertaining read when you live in the setting.

MLS: What do you like the look of? ME: I’m not sure if this is an aesthetic question of something more philosophical, but my immediate thought is that I like the look of people becoming more aware of social, political, ethical and environmental issues. Especially young kids. I've recently witnessed, on many different occasions, an attitude of responsibility and hope among the youth that's gaining momentum.

MLS: What film has most influenced you? ME: I usually reference two films. Albert Lamorisse's “The Red Balloon,” for it's social and emotional symbolism and it's simple, beautiful metaphors, and Maya Deren's “Meshes in the Afternoon” for it's poetic and inspiring landscape of mood and it's innovative approach to what I call gestural storytelling.

MLS: What is art for? ME: What is it not for? Art is ingrained in every moment of our existence and all of our experiences in one way or another. The design of a chair, a piece of music, a moment, an idea, even TV sometimes. Art serves as a reminder that the here and now could be our theoretical heaven and that we can choose to make it more or less so. In Tarkovksy's words, the role of art is to explain to artists and to those around them what humans live for, to explain the meaning of existence.

MLS: Who's your guilty pleasure artist -- why do you feel you shouldn't like him or her and why do you anyway?

ME: Maybe Banksy. For a street artist, he or she approaches work with poetic intention, as opposed to the more common, self-centered, self-aggrandizing style this genre often presents. It's more purposeful, more political, a bit more like the old muralists. If there's a reason I think I shouldn't like the work it’s maybe because it’s a bit superficial in terms of execution. The symbols are very directly implemented, but it's often beautiful, touching and meaningful stuff. I think that’s important.
Special note: To give people a feel for his “orphaned art films”, and to raise some funds to finish them, Escribano created a video at kickstarter.com.

"Art City Asks" are brief interviews with intriguing people who are part of or connected to Milwaukee's art scene. They are conducted via e-mail, in-person interview, video chat or whatever other format we may dream up. Some of the questions we use are inspired by the Frieze Questionnaire. If you would like to recommend someone for us to interview in an upcoming "Art City Asks," please email Mary Louise at mschumac@jrn.com or leave a comment below.

Images from top: Mark Escribano; Brent Budsberg dunking John Losciuto in "Water Tilling;" Budsberg as The Mime in "Mime Sickle Moon;" and a shot of Paris streets from "Monsieur Eiffel" starring Tate Bunker (and shot when another film, "Skinning the Whale" screened at the Pompidou Museum).

A glassy, 44-story tower called The Couture has been proposed for a primary spot of lakefront, an area that city and county officials have talked about fashioning as Milwaukee's front door and cultural hub.

The slim, oval-shaped tower would replace the aging and underused Downtown Transit Center, a structure that no one is going to miss, with high-end apartments, a hotel and retail.

The $120 million building has a price tag roughly equivalent to the Milwaukee Art Museum's Santiago Calatrava-designed expansion, which is essentially across the street.

This, of course, raises a few questions: Is the design excellence of The Couture up to the standards of this essential location? Does it fit in with the larger, overall plan for lakefront development (which as I pointed out in a recent article on the Saarinen-designed War Memorial has been piecemeal over the years).

The plan is being recommended by County Executive Chris Abele and would be developed by Rick Barrett, whose 30-story Moderne apartment high-rise is nearing completion downtown. It is designed by Rinka Chung Architects, which also designed the Moderne.

From an illustrated Betty Crocker cookbook to posters for the U.S. National Parks Service, Charley Harper brought his modernist style to a range of populist projects over the span of an incredibly prolific career.

For six decades the Cincinnati-based illustrator and graphic designer created spirited images of nature, a style he called “minimal realism.”

But he is best known for his perspective on one subject: birds.

With a love of observing nature that rivals Audubon’s, something akin to the precision of duck decoy carvers and using the crisp shapes and color of Modernist artists such as Joan Miro, Harper simplified birds to their essence.

Instead of feathers and beaks, Harper saw what he described as an ecosystem of lines and shapes.

He created illustrations for books such as “The Giant Golden Book of Biology: An Introduction to the Science of Life,” published in 1961, as well as nature-based organizations and magazines such as Ford Times. In Cincinnati, he designed a mural for the federal building. You have to pass through a security check point to see it.

It’s likely that Harper would have been considerably less known had he not been rediscovered in the latter years of his life by New York-based couture designer and MTV personality Todd Oldham.

Oldham’s original, 424-page monograph “Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life” is out of print and pricey, if you can find it from used booksellers. But thanks to a collaboration between Oldham and Target, Harper’ birds can go home with us for a modest $12.99.

Target is, of course, the big box with a design sensibility, the chain that hires design stars to help create new products. Results range from inspired to pandering, to my mind, but I would place the Kid Made Modern Wood Figures Painting Kit based on Harper’s birds firmly in the inspired category.

For me, it was a diverting project on a hot day and it certainly would be a lovely project to help children find their inner designer, as well.

The Harper kit was recommended for this week’s column by Lori Pitts, sales and marketing executive at Digital Edge, and one of 25 design-minded Milwaukeeans brainstorming ideas with me at Pinterest. To read recent "Design Ideas" columns, which run in Entree on Sundays and in Art City the Friday before, check out the archive.

Officials for the War Memorial Corp. and the Milwaukee Art Museum have, after several months of delay, sat down to talk.

The two organizations have been asked by Milwaukee County supervisors to meet to discuss who should have operational control of the War Memorial's buildings. The art museum, the major tenant in the complex, has recommended that it take control of the buildings and leave the programming of events for veterans to the War Memorial's board.

Negotiations began last Thursday. The museum was represented by board members Ken Krei, Ray Krueger and Tony Petullo. The War Memorial was represented by David Kurtz, the negotiations team leader, and members of the organization's policy committee, Mike Zielinski and Ted Barthel. Members of the Veterans Board of Directors, an advisory group to the War Memorial, also were present.

In a press release issued by the War Memorial Monday morning, the negotiations were described as "positive and mutually respectful."

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Keep up with the art scene and trends in urban design with art and architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher. Every week, you'll get the latest reviews, musings on architecture and her picks for what to do on the weekends.